Bitcoin wallets move nearly $30 million after 15 years dormant; each mined 50 BTC in 2010

Another batch of Bitcoin addresses awoke from dormancy on Thursday, adding to a trend of OG wallets executing transactions as the asset floats near its all-time highs.

Five BTC miner wallets that had been inactive for roughly 15.3 years transferred a combined 250 BTC, worth about $29.6 million at recent prices, to new addresses on Thursday, Arkham’s blockchain analytics data shows.

Each wallet originally received 50 BTC as a block subsidy in April 2010, during Bitcoin’s earliest mining era. The five legacy accounts, marked by their “1” prefix, consolidated the holdings into two new addresses, each starting with “bc1q”, the format introduced under the SegWit upgrade, which supports better error detection and advanced features, onchain analysts Lookonchain and Spotonchain noted on X.

What those 50 BTC were worth then, and what it likely cost to mine

When those blocks paid out over 15 years ago, Bitcoin’s quoted price on BitcoinMarket.com sat around $0.003 per BTC, putting the dollar value of a 50-BTC reward near 15 cents. The initial block subsidy was 50 BTC through the first halving cycle.

The marginal electricity to mine a single block in that era was trivial by today’s standards. Consumer CPUs of the period hashed on the order of tens of megahashes per second at roughly 95 watts, and 2010 U.S. residential power averaged about 11.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.

Even assuming hours of compute time at the then-prevailing difficulty, back-of-the-envelope math implies electricity costs in the cents-to-well-under-$1 range per successfully found block, with the larger expense being hardware and luck variance.

Dormant coins waking up has been a recurring theme this month as longtime holders reshuffle custody or realize gains. Bitcoin has largely digested large OG supply events in recent weeks, including activity linked to early-era whales, while ether demand has climbed, analysts told The Block earlier this week.

Separately, other decade-old wallets have sprung back to life this summer to move thousands of BTC as institutional accumulation accelerated Bitcoin to new highs. According to The Block’s price page, BTC has surged over 27% since January and traded at $118,480, less 4% shy of its $122,838 ATH.

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